GENERAL PINOCHET, who had overthrown the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, established the world's first neoliberal government in the midst of a bloodbath, and then tormented the Chilean people with his military dictatorship for the next 17 years, suffered a fatal heart attack on December 3, 2006. On that same day, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was re-elected to another six-year term with an overwhelming majority of 62.89 per cent against the 36.85 per cent received by his closest rival and darling of the financial interests in the country, Manuel Rosales.
Pinochet's coup d'etat inaugurated a quarter century of the "golden age" of imperial pillage in Latin America (1973-78) as neoliberal regimes arose across the continent, in country after country; close to a trillion dollars are estimated to have been plundered from the continent during that dark quarter century. Cuba seemed terminably isolated through all those years; and the short-lived Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was forced to retreat and disband itself.
The rise of Chavez to power in 1998-99 then signalled the beginning of what has now come to be known as Latin America's turn to the Left, or, in more colourful but politically more modest terms, the "pink tide".
Brazil is the continent's largest and most industrialised country, and the election of Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva - a high-school dropout, one-time shoeshine, a legendary trade union leader and leader of the Workers Party/Partido dos Trabalhadores (P.T.) - to the presidency in January 2003 did feel like an immense tidal wave (for the genesis of P.T. and Lula's actual performance in office, see "Radical promise, neoliberal policy", in Frontline, April 21, 2006).
Meanwhile, the neoliberal model of accumulation had entered a period of terminal crisis in a variety of countries, as for example in Argentina, the second largest economy of the continent, where, toward the end of that period, three Presidents came and went in the midst of mass insurrections, which ended only with the rise of Nestor Kirchner to the presidency in May 2003, just five months after Lula's electoral victory in Brazil. No socialist in any meaningful sense, Kirchner did repudiate part of the debt to foreign institutions while Venezuela bought up the rest of the Argentine debt, and Kirchner thereby earned his right to be counted as part of the "pink tide" and member of the "moderate Left".
The next break came in little Uruguay, sandwiched between Brazil and Argentina, when Tabare Vasquez was elected in October 2004 and became the first head of state in the country's history who identified himself as a "socialist". But the decisive event in this electoral tide was the stunning victory of Evo Morales in Bolivia in December 2005, since it is only in Bolivia, alongside Cuba and Venezuela, that any possibility of radical social change actually exists, in contrast to the "moderate Left" governments elsewhere ("Bolivia: Revolution through the ballot?", Frontline, January 13, 2006, and "Is Socialism Possible in Bolivia?", Frontline, January 27, 2006).
These three countries now constitute what Chavez calls "the axis of good" and Tariq Ali in his latest book calls "the axis of hope". That seismic upheaval in Bolivia was quickly followed by the electoral victories of Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Rene Preval in Haiti, at two extreme ends of the continent ("Latin America's pink tide", Frontline, March 10, 2006, for extended commentaries on those two elections). Preval's victory was in some ways the more significant, in that it repudiated the United States-sponsored coup against the former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and defied the will of the U.S.-backed occupation forces who allowed Preval to assume the presidency only under unbearable pressure from the agitating masses of Haiti. President Michelle Bachelet is a "moderate" leftist whom the socialist Left eventually came to support, albeit reluctantly. Her own father had been tortured and exiled by Pinochet, and mass revulsion against Pinochet is strong enough in Chile for her to refuse to grant any official mourning to the dictator.
That is where matters stood when I drafted a series of articles on Latin America in the earlier half of this year under the general title, "Fire in the Plains, Fire in the Mountains". One of the many arguments in that part of the series was that, regardless of all the media hype and general enthusiasm about Latin America's famous "turn to the Left", and despite the welcome crisis of the neoliberal model, there, in fact, was a three-way divide across the continent. Articles on Bolivia were designed to emphasise the scope of popular uprisings and the real potential for radical social change as Evo Morales took up the presidency in the midst of a pauperised economy and social wreckage - but with Cuban inspiration and Venezuelan financial backing, so to speak.
A full-length article on Brazil and another one on the electoral results in Chile and Haiti were meant to introduce, among other things, a word of caution about the potentials of the "moderate Left" as it took power within the confines of the neoliberal model; even The Economist and The Wall Street Journal had expressed the hope that Lula would exercise a moderating influence on Morales, and, more generally, it was best to remember that with the neoliberal model in crisis and with the U.S. bogged down in the wars of West Asia, global finance capital in fact was relying on the "moderate Left" in Latin America, as it had traditionally relied on right-wing social democracy in Western Europe, to manage the crisis within the well-established capitalist constraints. The "pink tide" is certainly to be preferred over the dark days of military dictatorships but it is best not to nurse any illusions about it.
Furthermore, the right-wing was itself alive and well, and very much in control of things in some key countries. As a major economy with formidable oil resources and a full-fledged member of the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), Mexico is after all at least as crucial for Latin America's political balance as is Brazil or Argentina with their "moderate Left" governments. Mexican President Vincent Fox was a close ally of the U.S. Then, there was also the full-blown, neoliberal, militarised right-wing regime of President Alvaro Uribe Velez in Colombia, which hosts the U.S.' largest counter-insurgency operation in the continent.
The war between the U.S.-sponsored government forces and the guerillas has taken roughly 300,000 lives, with no end in sight ("Colombia's lethal concoction", Frontline, April 7, 2006). And if Colombia has U.S.-funded military bases on the border of Venezuela from which paramilitary personnel is routinely infiltrated into Venezuelan territory as far as Caracas itself, tiny Paraguay, at the heart of the continent, hosts U.S. bases on the borders of Bolivia and is so much in the pocket of the U.S. that the Bush family, just between father and son, owns roughly 2.7 per cent of the country's territory as their personal real estate. Roughly 40,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Latin America at present, under various pretexts, even as the U.S. runs short of troops for its wars in West Asia.
Latin America shines by contrast with the rest of the world. No European country now has a sizable party of the genuinely socialist Left or a militant workers' movement of any political consequence. Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac were always men of the right-wing and with Angela Merkel's rise as the new Chancellor, Germany is now more closely aligned with the U.S. than it was in the days when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was bombing Yugoslavia into destruction and submission or when German troops went into Afghanistan to help out the Americans.
In Italy, Romano Prodi formally represents the Centre-Left but is also an ideal representative of a bankers' Europe. With these leaders at the helm and with the European Union's (E.U.) expansion eastward, the very idea that Europe might represent a more humane alternative to a neoconservative and neoliberal U.S. - the dream of a "social charter" for Europe - now appears absurd.
In West Asia, secular Left has been defeated decisively and any genuine resistance to Israel's Zionist visions is now represented by the likes of Hamas and Hizbollah, neo-orthodox Islamist formations that rose upon the ruins of the secular Left, and whom one is now constrained to support, however critically, because they are at present the only viable forces of resistance fighting against Israel's militarist and racist expansionism. In Iraq, which was at least secular under the ferocious dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, resistance to U.S. imperialism has degenerated into mass communal fratricides - precisely what the U.S. wanted - and Iran is dominated by a semi-literate, fanatical President who has staked all his political capital on upholding the bizarre, neo-Nazi argument that the extermination of six million Jews in Nazi Europe never happened. India, one of the world's largest economies in aggregate terms and once a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, is now the "most allied ally" of the U.S. and Israel, while China, with a much larger economy, is now so deeply intertwined into the consumer markets and financial structures of the U.S. that any deep crisis in either of the two economies would have far-reaching negative consequences for the other. Indeed, insofar as China and Japan are the principal financiers upholding the stability of the U.S. economy, one can say that, indirectly, they are also the countries financing the empire's wars in West Asia.
It is by contrast to all these other global trends that Latin America in general, and even its "moderate Left," shines; who in his right mind would not prefer even Lula to any of the European or Asian leaders. And there are probably a dozen countries around the world where Chavez could win an election as handsomely as he has won in Venezuela.
That remark takes us back, then, to the electoral map of Latin America as it has emerged over the past six months. Frontline's series of articles on the continent was suspended in mid-2006 because some crucial elections were to take place in the second half of 2006 - in Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela - and it seemed prudent to wait for the results.
Those results are now in, and they have only re-stabilised the three-way divide detected earlier. Victories of the right-wing came early. President Uribe, who faced a powerful guerilla insurgency but no formidable electoral challenge from the Left in Colombia, won relatively easily, in late May although the links of his administration with the drug-dealing paramilitary terrorist organisations are well known. A week later, on June 4, Alan Garcia, a shrewd and cautious man who is haunted by memories of human rights abuses in his previous administration of the 1980s, won in Peru, against Ollanta Hamala, a more maverick left-wing candidate who had dominated the electoral campaign at earlier stages.
It had been understood for a considerable length of time, however, that the key contest for the balance of political force on the continental scale was going to be in Mexico, in July 2006, and victory for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador would have tipped the balance very much in favour of the Left. In the event, he was denied the fruits of what appeared by all counts to have been his victory and the supreme federal electoral tribunal, forced to concede that there had been extensive electoral fraud, nevertheless awarded the presidency to the right-wing candidate, Felipe Calderon. While popular resistance to that theft of the presidency was impressive, it was not formidable enough to force the federal electoral tribunal to abide by the popular mandate, as had happened earlier in Haiti - in an admittedly different situation.
With the Mexican elections "lost," there now was no question of a considerable continental shift further to the Left. The only question was: will there be a comparable shift to the right, instead? And answer to that question depended on the outcome in Brazil where Lula was fighting for re-election. He failed to win a clear-cut majority in the first round but then won convincingly in the second round, with over 60 per cent of the vote. That in itself was rather remarkable.
I know no Brazilian leftist who is not intensely unhappy with Lula's policies; indeed, I have friends who have said to me that they are so dejected with the performance of Lula in power that they feel they have wasted their lives building the movement that brought him to power in the first place. However, I also know no Brazilian leftist, barring a couple of Trotskyist friends, who was willing, even conceptually, to split the vote of the Left and thereby possibly pave the way for the candidate representing finance capital. Lula in power is problem enough; Lula out of power and replaced by the opponent would have been a disaster. He has betrayed virtually all promises he and his party made but it is also the case that in the course of his presidency, incomes of the working classes have indeed risen.
The next two elections came in Nicaragua and Ecuador, in November. Daniel Ortega, a legendary leader of the Sandinista revolution, has by now remade himself into a devout Christian and his candidacy was in fact blessed by the Catholic Church; he chose a former member of the anti-Sandinista force of the Contras as his running mate. Even so, and given the choices, Chavez had supported him and the U.S. even accused Chavez of pouring money into Ortega's electoral campaign. Be that as it may, Ortega won handsomely and became a part of the "pink tide".
The more interesting case to watch is actually that of Rafael Correa who won the presidency in Ecuador later that month, just a week before the Venezuelan elections. Like Bolivia, Ecuador too has been rocked by popular uprisings, and very much like both Bolivia and Peru, not to speak of Colombia as well, Ecuador too has powerful indigenous movements.
Unlike Morales, however, Correa has no deep roots in popular movements and is basically riding the crest of a wave, in his own flamboyant fashion. That flamboyance sometimes takes delightful forms. Asked during the campaign if he would allow the U.S. military bases in Ecuador to continue to function, he said he would if the U.S. would allow Ecuador to have military bases in Miami. He is a young U.S.-educated economist and has already served as Finance Minister. Now he promises to join the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) which Chavez is trying to revitalise, to repudiate Ecuador's participation in the U.S.-backed Free Trade Area for the Americas (FTAA), to support the Venezuelan initiative that rejects FTAA and instead offers the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), and to ask the U.S. military to vacate its base at Manta.
On all such matters, it is just prudent to wait and see how the "pink tide" winners in both Nicaragua and Ecuador would perform when in power; neither has a majority in the respective legislatures in any case, and that alone would restrict their room for manoeuvre - not to speak of the fact that Ecuador, a tiny, poor country on the Pacific Coast, and historically dominated by the U.S., is separated from Bolivia with the whole length of Peru, and from Venezuela with the whole breadth of Colombia. It has no other immediate neighbours; governments in the immediate neighbourhood do matter.
Then came the elections in Venezuela itself, on December 3, and Chavez predictably won, with over two-thirds of the vote, in an election that witnessed 74.87 per cent turnout among the 16 million registered voters in the country. Neither the victory nor the margin of victory was a surprise. The surprise was in the smoothness of the process, and how easily, machine-like, it happened. About 1,400 observers were on hand to witness the day's events including 10 representatives from the Carter Centre in the U.S., 130 from the E.U., 60 from the Organisation of American States (OAS) and 10 from the Mercosur Common Market of the South countries.
At day's end, the OAS team leader Juan Enrique Fisher congratulated Venezuelan officials for a "transparent and well-run election" and described the voting as "massive and peaceful". E.U. leader Antonio Garcia Velasquez said Venezuelan electoral officials gave them "complete liberty and with all requirements so that the job (of observing) can be fulfilled in conformity with our stipulations". Neither Rosales, the losing candidate, nor his patrons in Washington, challenged the fairness of the elections, as they had routinely done in the case of all elections and referendums in Venezuela over the past seven years.
Indeed, with the single and highly significant exception of the Mexican elections, which the right-wing stole and which produced such mass demonstrations, none of the other elections in Latin America over the past year or so has been seriously challenged by anyone, even as Washington's favourites lost most of them.
Why? Part of the explanation might well be that, with the U.S. bogged down in West Asia and the Bush administration losing the recent congressional elections in the country, Washington is in no position to adopt too aggressive a posture in Latin America, militarily or politically, beyond defending its positions in Colombia and Mexico. Secondly, Latin America seems to be settling into what one may call a war of position: each side counting its assets and utilising them shrewdly, as it prepares for the long haul.
Venezuela seems to be the only country with both a radical vision as well as the financial resources adequate enough to finance the practical expressions of that vision; if anything, it lacks the organisational skills to put those financial resources to optimal use. Cuba and Bolivia seem to have the vision but not the resources.
The "moderate Left", which has taken control of some two-thirds of the continent can be contained within the modified regime of capital accumulation and is provisionally aligned with Venezuela only, or at least largely, because it has surplus finance to support those governments; even Alan Garcia of Peru, having won the elections against the Centre-Left candidate, is making friendly overtures toward Chavez. In other words, the immense popularity and clout of Chavez across Latin America needs to be grasped as a double-edged phenomenon: the masses love him because of what he is and the vision he represents, the ruling elite of the "moderate Left" governments love him, rather, for all the petrodollars he can dispense and they would drop him instantly if petroleum prices were to collapse and Venezuela's earnings were to drop accordingly. Were Chavez to be stripped of his petroleum earnings, he would still be immensely popular among the masses, as Fidel Castro always was, but he would have little influence over governments beyond Cuba and (perhaps) Bolivia.
The U.S. can afford to live with this reality for some years, as it sorts out its problems in West Asia as well as the much more formidable and structural problems it faces with respect to its own economy. At the end of the day, the fact would still remain that Venezuela's current (2005) gross domestic product (GDP) of $160 billion is less than half of Exxon-Mobil's sale volume (also 2005) of $371 billion, not to speak of the U.S.' GDP of $12.5 trillion. Dollar to dollar, the U.S. can buy up the "moderate Left" much more easily than the Venezuelans can, at a time of its own choosing; the list of quasi-socialist parties in Latin America that participated in the neoliberal restructuring of their economies is painfully long, and it is doubtful that the Kirchners and Correas of our own time would fare very much better in the financial marketplace.
So, the massive trust that the Venezuelan masses have put in the charismatic and even visionary figure of Hugo Chavez is, in the final analysis, something of a reprieve. He has another six years to put into action the "socialism of the 21st century" that he promises. The Venezuelan Constitution he put in place does not permit him another term of office. Chavez says that he will hold a referendum in favour of a constitution amendment that would allow him more terms of office. He may then be a head of state for as long as Fidel Castro has been. Even so, even as he retains immense popularity, the contrast remains: Castro built a socialist state with virtually no financial resources and in the teeth of a perpetual embargo from the U.S., while all the programmes of social transformation Chavez has inaugurated in Venezuela rely heavily on state funding while structures of property and privilege remain largely unchallenged. He seems to believe that "the people" can be empowered, thanks to the financial resources of the state, without radically transforming the class structure of society as a whole. That may eventually turn out to be the real flaw in his vision. Chavez is yet to try and imagine how he would build a socialist Venezuela without the oil wealth. Or, as one may put it in the American slang: bottom up, rather than top down.
This question we shall take up, among others, in a later article. Now that all the electoral results have come in and we more or less know what structures of governing power are going to be in the various countries, across the continent, future articles in this series can focus on specific issues. The issue of what happens in Mexico, which includes what happens in the electoral field after an already delegitimised regime has taken power but also a variety of popular resistances, remains central and shall be addressed in a full-length article.
Equally important, if not more central, is the issue of the rise of the indigenous movements that are cutting across the whole continent and are at the heart of the social revolution that is taking place below, and beyond, but including the matter of state power. Finally, the revolutionary process in Venezuela itself requires an extended analysis.
Fidel Castro is known to have told a visitor that it is only in Venezuela that the Cuban Revolution got its first break in Latin America, after waiting and striving toward such a break for roughly 40 years. It is significant that he regarded neither the Chilean road to socialism, under Salvador Allende, nor the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, as a development quite so decisive. For that alone Hugo Chavez deserves our greatest respect. That he has been re-elected and would now be expected to be at the helm of affairs in his country for another at least six years means, among other things, that the resourcefulness of the Venezuelan revolution shall be there to help Cuba as it makes the difficult transition to a time when Fidel shall not be there to guide his people. The glory of Chavez is that he allowed himself to be guided by Fidel, the supreme commandant of the Latin American revolution. Time may yet come when Chavez is called upon to take up that mantle.
Fidel and Pinochet. The two faces of revolution and counterrevolution in Latin America. Pinochet just died an ignominious death. Fidel is battling what appears to be a terminal illness. Virtually the whole of Latin America has risen to repudiate the authoritarianism and neoliberalism that Pinochet tried to impose upon that continent. As Fidel approaches death, he can find solace in the fact that he remains perhaps the best-loved man in the continent where millions march with his vision in their hearts. Chavez may yet redeem the promise that Fidel once made. He is still growing and coming into his own, in the great master's footsteps.
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